Garden mulching

Our gardens are never short of mulch.  And with all the plants reseeding themselves, it gets so messy! Like this one by the front window:

I thought I'd try and plant some Alcea/Hollyhocks this year.  I read that they are bi-annuals so they might not even flower this year.  The soil around here is quite clay-ish, so hopefully it will just grow??

I've never bought or even seen roots like these before.  So yeah, hopefully something will grow.  Ha!

More stuff multiplying under the leaning tree.  And this spot even has landscape fabric underneath. The plants are happily growing above it.  Sheesh!

Nothing like seeing a storm coming in while mulching.  Yikes!

I was told by our neighbor next door that this water used to get all the way up to our garage door.  I can't imagine! So I guess we should be happy it's only accumulating in this little part of the driveway:

Another day and another storm. There's been so many lately:

I'm sort of glad Graham picked up this red wagon for free.  It's been super useful lugging my gardening stuff around :-)

Do you see the tree line beyond the wagon? Well, that's the entire row of tree/plants that I need to mulch.  Look at it.  Aaaahhh...!!!

I spend a few hours in the afternoon pulling weeds and then thinning out what's necessary.  Progress is sooooo slow:

At least it does look better than the un-mulched section.  I was hoping to make it look more "organic" but it's just too messy and waaaaay too many weeds:

Did I say yet another storm???

The boys have been shooting their bows into the pile of mulch.  They said they lost a couple of arrows.  Well,... found them. Ha!

At least there are some pretty flowers that are blooming right now.  You'd never suspect this one to be so pretty.  It almost looks like a weed at first:

But then, look at its vibrant bloom!  A friend of mine thinks it's some sort of poppy:

Just looked it up online, should be a red oriental poppy.  I tried to move this one to another location as I wanted to plant a couple of milkweeds.  Uhhh... nope! It did not like it's new spot and just splatted flat and died.  Oops!! 

This is what it's supposed to look like.  Could totally mistaken it for a weed when it starts to come out of the ground:

And these are the start of the White Alliums blooming:

Pretty! 

I'm still continuing to grow some veggies under ths grow light.  Hope the corn turns out this year and doesn't get eaten by who-knows-what in the middle of the night:

Unintentionally growing some sort of mushrooms too. LOL!!

Still have about 2/3 left of mulching to do in that row of trees/plants.  I'm getting a break for a couple of days since it's been raining so much.  We got almost 3" yesterday!  And my truck was pelted with some hail while I was out and about. Yikes!!